The Star Command Center is used by enterprises across major industries to manage and automate disparate reporting, planning, and analysis environments with applications, data warehouses and business intelligence tools from multiple vendors.

By orchestrating interoperability between on-premise and Cloud applications on the Windows Azure Cloud platform, the new edition will allow users to accelerate business decisions by accessing time-sensitive automated application processes using mobile phones, tablets or PCs.

Developers should be doing more to secure consumer applications, according to a new report from the Security Development Lifecycle team. The SDL Progress Report shares data and analysis from various groups in our organization. We hope you find valuable information on secure development lessons learned at Microsoft, how we've applied security science, and the correlation between holistic security processes, risk reduction, and organizational efficiency.

A web-based video game startup help educates kids on how to make healthier eating choices, recent winner of the White House’s Healthy Apps for Kids contest.

Built using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery, founder Aaron Coleman had to migrate off of traditional hosting and onto Azure the day he discovered he had won the White House’s contest. He needed to scale quickly in anticipation of the press Food Buster was going to receive. Aaron explains how he was able to adapt his ASP.NET application to take advantage of Azure’s native features and redeploy everything in a day.

Bing Maps Technology Specialist Johannes Kebeck worked with Microsoft Japan to deploy the Road-status After the Earthquake website that shows current status of roads in Japan following its recent natural disasters. Delivered as a Bing Map and built on the Windows Azure platform in just days, this website provides real-time searchable status of roads across Japan and is accessible from multiple platforms and browsers, including most mobile devices.

Find our more about what’s happening at MIX on Channel 9. Jennifer Ritzinger (event owner) and Mike Swanson (keynote and content owner) host a weekly video show to talk about the latest news and ‘behind-the-scenes’ information about the MIX event.

Want to get the most out of MIX11? Attend a full day of pre-conference Boot Camps designed to get you up-to-speed on the most important technologies in web design and development. Need to ramp up on Silverlight, HTML5, CSS3, or jQuery. Want to learn how to take advantage of the Cloud or how to build Silverlight applications for SharePoint? There’s a Boot Camp for both. Perhaps you’d like to learn how high-profile, complex sites and games are built using the latest web technologies? We have speakers from some of the top interactive agencies in the world deconstructing their projects right before your eyes. Whether you’re a designer or a developer you can take advantage of some of the best, most comprehensive content available from some of the industry’s most regarded presenters.

The popular MIX11 pre-conference Boot Camps are lecture style and will include high-quality visuals, code examples and walk-trough's, as well as materials you can take with you for later reference.

You can vote for your favorite in the People’s Choice Awards chosen for the United States finalists in Imagine Cup. The finalists represent the top students applying innovation in business, technology, digital media, and more to real-world challenges.

Vote each day until April 9 and return to find the winners on April 11. Just a few votes separate the top places. You can make an impact by voting today.

Every Windows Phone has a built in accelerometer that's accessible via the Microsoft.Devices.Sensors namespace. Using the Accelerometer API is easy; however, the sensor output contains raw information, and it's up to the developer to figure out what to do with it.

But if you want to your application to respond to a shake, a new library can help.

I recently began a series of 3 Day Instructor Led Trainings (ILT) in Irvine (Orange County), Silicon Valley and Redmond. The course is a 200/300 level and uses the Windows Azure Training Kit as the primary learning curriculum.The training kit is quite large, and the instructor (Vivek Bhatnagar @vivekbhatnagar) selects the most relevant topics/labs to cover over the 3 day period. The students have plenty of material to cover after the training is completed.

If you weren’t able to attend a local training event, you can download the Windows Azure Platform Training Course and get started on your own. I’ve provided a link for a free 30 day Azure pass, system requirements and required software below:

What is AppMakr?AppMakr is a browser-based platform, that makes developing Windows Phone 7 Apps quick and easy. No coding required. Anyone with existing content can use it and build Windows Phone 7 apps for free.

Microsoft Expression Web 4 Service Pack 1 (SP1) contains significant fixes and improvements in publishing, in the SuperPreview feature, in file management, extensibility, and in other areas of the program. Visit this site for more information/download

Issues that are resolved in this service pack:

Fixed several issues to improve product stability.

PHP include statements now update when included filename is changed in Web.

PHP pages now correctly start the development server when they are previewed.

Improved Insert Silverlight video.

Improved performance of Team Foundation Source Control with large sites.

Improved UI behavior of the Publishing pane.

User-selected character encoding for a page is now correctly recognized, resolving problems with extended characters.

Microsoft began to deliver our first updates to Windows Phone 7 earlier this week. Users will now benefit from new functionalities and improvements that will make their experience with Windows Phone 7 even better. This update include copy and paste functionality and faster start-up time when loading apps. It also includes wifi performance, messaging improvements.

MIX is a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web. Sessions range from technical, code-based topics to expert advice on content strategy, usability and design. Explore the future of the standards-based web – join the conversation at MIX11.

The new System Center 2012, announced at Microsoft Management Summit, will enable your IT managers and your customers’ IT Managers build private clouds with the infrastructure they know and own today — including other vendors’ platforms and virtualization technologies.

ISVs are using Microsoft virtualization to deploy server applications like Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. Your customers use Microsoft virtualization to deploy and manage your custom Line of Business (LOB) applications.

Microsoft Expression product team has announced Microsoft Expression Web Professional Service Pack 1 (SP1). Many of the enhancements came from customer requests ensuring our technology is keeping pace with current web standards and fully supports new technologies like Internet Explorer (IE) 9.

Expression Web 4 SP1 1 provides complete support for HTML 5 in the Code Editor and significant support in Design View. IntelliSense in the code editor makes it easy to insert the new HTML5 tags into your markup. Block and inline elements are easily selectable in Design View, where they can be styled and adjusted.

You re invited to this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Los Angeles, California, July 10–14. Registration for WPC is now open and I encourage you to take the time to sign up today to reserve your place at this valuable event.

WPC is your time to hear about the Microsoft strategic road map, spend time with other partners and Microsoft team members and executives, and learn about new ways to grow your business. WPC is the best chance all year to connect with people who can help you shape your strategies and expand your business.

This year’s conference can also help you build your cloud strategy. You’ll have the opportunity to hear about the full range of Microsoft cloud solutions so that you can stay up-to-date on this growing market.

Register today and get a $300 USD discount! Early-bird pricing is in effect now through April 25.

Along with the general availability of Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2, you can now learn how to get started with the Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 Training Kit. The Training Kit contains demos and labs to help you learn to use and extend LightSwitch. The introductory materials walk you through the Visual Studio LightSwitch product and shows you how to rapidly build advanced applications.

Congratulations to the winners of the state and local government Windows Phone 7 applications contest. The contest highlights winners of the best Windows Phone 7 applications for State and Local Governments.